Homesteading for Beginners (When You’re Broke)

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Interested in homesteading for beginners? I got you!

I started homesteading in a rental apartment with hard, rusty water and about zero extra dollars in the budget. 

No land. No barn. No “someday farm” fund sitting in a savings account (I wish!). 

Just a tiny kitchen, a windowsill, and a growing list of things I was frustrated about.

harvested carrots on a table

This was back in the early 2010s when I was faced with the reality that my expensive degree did not, in fact, guarantee me a well-paying job. 

(The joke was on me, and the rest of us elder millennials)

So, my story started from a financial need, not a dream (the dream came later!)

But the skills I built because of that need have served me well as my dream grew from cutting spending to creating a whole alternative lifestyle.

Many people assume when you start homesteading you need acreage, or at least a house you own, before you’re really doing the thing. 

You don’t. 

Or they assume the first step is buying a farm.

It’s not.

The truth is, most people don’t have that as a real immediate option. 

What you do need, though, is a willingness to make things yourself, use what you have, and learn as you go — and none of that costs money.

I’ve been at this for years now. 

I’m a certified permaculture designer. I’ve raised chickens (and later ducks) on and off since about 2013, and I help people design their own apothecary gardens and food forest guilds for a living. 

But every single one of those things started with me figuring out how to make my own bug spray because I couldn’t afford the natural stuff at the store — and I was sick of being poisoned by chemicals.

So if you’re starting from broke, I want to show you exactly where I started, plus the essential skills every broke beginner homesteader should learn first — in order. 

Feel free to skip steps that don’t interest you, but I’ve ordered these to start with the skills that need zero extra money or resources and give you the biggest payoff.

Summary I started homesteading broke, in a rental apartment, with no land and no savings — just a kitchen, a windowsill, and a list of things I was tired of paying for. This post walks through the actual skills I learned first (and in what order), why you don’t need land or money to start, and how those same skills eventually turned into extra income. 

Homesteading Doesn’t Require Money (It Requires This Instead)

Here’s what actually gets you started: a willingness to fail doing something new, making something, or fixing something instead of hiring it out.

That’s it.

I know that sounds like something you’d see on a motivational poster, but it’s absolutely how it works. 

The homesteaders I know with the most impressive setups — big gardens, full pantries, working systems — almost all started with a single skill they were willing to figure out.

For me, that skill was scratch cooking. For you it might be something else entirely. The point isn’t where you start. It’s that you start with what’s already in front of you.

And if you can turn that first (or tenth!) skill you learned into something other people will pay you for, even better!

When I first started out I had no idea that some of the skills I learned as a homesteader would become my career later. 

Your story might unfold differently, and that’s okay, but just keep your eyes and mind open to all opportunities and possibilities. 

Maybe something you learn becomes a business. Maybe it just becomes the thing that saves you $50 a month forever. Both are great! 

You Don’t Need Land to Start

I homesteaded for years without owning a single square foot of property… I still don’t, technically. I’ve built everything I have at my family’s home (which is barely an acre). 

Some of that time was spent entirely in a rental apartment with rusty water and a loud upstairs neighbor. 

If you’re renting, homesteading when you rent is often the better place to build your skills first, because you’re forced to get resourceful before you ever have to manage a big space. 

And apartment homesteading specifically is where I’d point anyone who thinks they need a yard before any of this counts.

Learn the indoor skills first (I’ll go into detail below!). 

When your own land does show up, you’ll already know exactly what to do with it.

The 11 Homesteading Skills to Learn First

Wherever you are, with land or without, these are the skills you most need to know. 

I’m starting with the ones that are easiest to learn without resources like money or land — but they’re also important to learn first even if you do have land. You’ll see why as we go through the list.

1 – Scratch Cooking & Pantry Staples

Learning to cook your own meals from raw ingredients is one of, if not the most important skill you can master in homesteading. If you don’t know how to cook, all those eggs and veggies you grow won’t be very helpful — and your grocery budget won’t benefit either.

This is also, dollar for dollar, one of the fastest-paying-off skills on this entire list. 

Nearly everything on the list below costs a fraction of the store-bought version once you know how to make it yourself. 

I had a bit of a leg up here. My family always cooked — we weren’t a take-out household. 

But back in the 90s, when I was a kid, “cooking” still meant recipes built around packaged products, like cream of mushroom soup or boxed stuffing mix. 

So I did have basic cooking skills… but learning to cook exclusively from raw ingredients was something I had to master as an adult… right alongside figuring out how to stretch a grocery budget that wasn’t very stretchy.

And it wasn’t just meals — I learned to make the pantry staples themselves, the ones that add up fast when you’re buying them pre-made (especially the specialty stuff like dairy-free and gluten-free items). 

If you’ve never been much of a cook and want help getting started, I have a whole post that walks you through it: 

Cooking From Scratch for Beginners

Here are some of the staples I started with — every one of them cheaper homemade than store-bought:

Master this one first. It’s the cheapest skill on this list to start practicing today, and it’s a foundational skill worth prioritizing. 

2 – Home Herbalism

Another skill you can learn right in your kitchen is home herbalism. 

Even if you don’t want to get deep into the energetics of herbs, having a basic understanding of herbal remedies and kitchen remedies is a really good place to be. 

These will help you improve your health, prevent illness, and give you natural, safe first-aid supplies you can DIY — for a fraction of what the store-bought versions cost.

That last part matters more than people expect. A single bottle of elderberry syrup at the store can run $15–20, and it’s made with cane sugar instead of health-boosting honey.

Once you know how to make these yourself from bulk dried herbs, one batch usually costs a few dollars and lasts the whole season — and you end up with a full cabinet instead of one bottle.

I started making herbal remedies at home from bulk herbs I bought from Mountain Rose Herbs or Starwest Botanicals. So you don’t even need to grow them yourself before getting the benefit of homemade herbal remedies.

Here’s what I recommend having in your home apothecary cabinet, at minimum:

  • Elderberry syrup or another immune-supporting preparation
  • Mint for headaches and digestion (and to add flavor to other teas)
  • Chamomile for digestive upset and calming/relaxation (and to add flavor to other teas) 
  • Raw honey — to add to teas, make syrups, or use solo for sore throats
  • Some kind of healing salve — I like calendula salve for cuts, scrapes, and other skin abrasions
  • Red raspberry leaf tea if there are menstruating or pregnant women in the household
  • Garlic — antimicrobial, I use it for an ear infection aid
  • Ginger — nausea/digestive

You can grow some of these (we’ll get to that later), but most of them are easily found at the grocery store or local natural food stores. You can also find these herbs online.

3 – Food Preservation

We’re still just in the kitchen! 

Food preservation is a great skill to work on even if you don’t have outside space for growing anything yet. 

Buy in-season produce at the farmers market or grocery store — it’s often dramatically cheaper than the same item out of season — and process it while the price is low. 

Once you do have things growing yourself, you’ll already know exactly what to do with the abundance instead of stressing to figure it out in the moment.

And preserving food rather than tossing it out is always a great way to save cash.

I love when I’m at the grocery store, and I can skip a bunch of purchases because I know I already have those in my freezer or pantry… It feels so good!

When I first started, that was a bag of green onions in the freezer, but now, years later, it’s onions, pumpkins, squash, and potatoes in cold storage… plus leeks, basil, tomatoes, and more in the freezer and a bunch of dried herbs in the pantry at minimum.

Here are some of my favorite things to preserve:

Just choose your favorites — the fruits or veggies you eat a lot and could realistically grow in your area — and learn how to process them. 

Freezing is the easiest method (and one of my favorites) since it needs almost no special equipment. Fermentation and dehydrating are also low-cost to start.

 Canning is the one method here with some upfront cost and a lot of additional knowledge, but it’s not necessary to learn if you don’t want to.

I’ve been doing this for many years and have never canned a single thing. So, if canning is too overwhelming or expensive, just use other preservation methods instead (simple fix!)

4 – DIY Skills

This one’s more of a mindset shift but is a really important part of becoming a homesteader. Before you pay someone else to do it, ask whether it’s something you could learn to do yourself. 

Whether that’s small home repairs, mending clothes instead of replacing them, or fixing something instead of tossing it, learning to handle things you’d otherwise hire out saves real money while building skills that stack on top of each other.

I started asking this question early on, and because of that, began making my own personal care products, mending clothes, etc. I even know how to put up drywall!

A few places to start, roughly in order of how quickly they pay off:

  • Basic sewing and mending — things like patching torn clothes, replacing buttons, and hemming pants. A single tailoring visit can run as much as $50 for small alterations while a sewing kit costs less than than and will last for years. I recently heard some advice from an expert sewist: clothing today is made so poorly that you can absolutely sew something at least as good yourself, even if you’re brand new to sewing. This is one of the skills I’ve been wanting to get better at but just haven’t had the time (maybe soon!). 
  • Simple home repairs — think patching drywall, fixing a running toilet, unclogging a drain, or tightening loose hardware. If you don’t knwo how to do these things, youtube is a great resource. It’s teh frist place I go when i need to learn a specific skill quickly.
  • Basic appliance troubleshooting — before assuming something’s broken and needs replacing, a lot of appliances just need a part cleaned, a filter changed, or a simple fix. A service call alone can cost as much as the part. Again, Youtube is your friend!
  • Furniture fixes and upcycling — tightening a wobbly chair, refinishing something secondhand instead of buying new. This one doubles as a way to furnish a home cheaply, not just fix what you already have. This is another skill I wish I had more time for building because it’s actually quite fun to transform something into a more beautiful and functional piece.

None of these need to be mastered right away, and you don’t need to be good at all of them. Pick the ones that match problems you’re already running into. Those skills will serve you right now.

The bigger pattern here matters more than any single skill: every time you default to “let me try first” instead of “let me pay someone,” you’re building the resourcefulness to figure it out on your own. 

And what I love most about building these skills is: I feel connected to my ancestors who had to be at least a little bit good at most things.

5 – Make Your Own Personal Care Products

One frustration I have had about not having a lot of extra money was that it felt like I had to settle for products I knew were harming my health. But making my own personal care products changed that. 

This is actually where a lot of my homesteading journey started. Back in that rental apartment with the hard, rusty water, my hair was a frizzy, damaged mess, and buying “natural” haircare to fix it wasn’t in the budget. 

So I started making my own — and once I realized how easy (and cheap) that was, it opened the door to replacing almost everything else in my bathroom cabinet the same way.

Knowing how to make these products is helpful for when you need to save money, can’t get to the store, or just want to know exactly what’s in what you’re putting on your body. 

Buying the ingredients in bulk means you always have them on hand, and one batch usually stretches for months.

Here are some of my favorite things to make:

Once you’ve made a batch or two, you’ll wonder why you ever paid full price for something you can make from ingredients sitting in your own cabinet. 

I don’t always make all of these (some I do, some I don’t, depending on the season and how busy life is), but it’s good to have the skill as a backup.

6 – Grow a Vegetable

Now we’re moving outside! If you have any space at all, even just a little bit, you can start gardening — and this is where those grocery savings really start to add up. A $3–4 seed packet can produce $30 or more worth of vegetables over a season, which is one of the best returns on a small investment you’ll find anywhere on this list.

Does a Vegetable Garden Always Save You Money?

Well, it depends.

You can just as easily lose money gardening as save it. A well-established, well-cared-for garden absolutely saves money year after year. But factor in:

  • Raised bed materials
  • Soil amendments
  • Purchased soil
  • Tools and other startup costs

…and you’re likely not saving money right away, at least not in year one.

My advice: start your garden with as little cash as possible, so you see that return sooner. (I’ll go deeper on how to do that cheaply in another post.)

Learn Your Zone — Then Learn Your Actual Conditions

Even places in the same growing zone can vary wildly in how well certain plants grow. Knowing that ahead of time saves you money as much as frustration. 

There’s nothing worse than spending on seeds, soil, and a season’s effort on something that was never going to thrive where you are.

(Looking at you, hops going moldy the second they’re ready for harvest, because apparently the Northern East Coast isn’t the Northern West Coast.)

Choose one to three easy vegetables to start with. It’s much more budget-efficient to take a single crop from seed all the way to your pantry than to spread a small amount of money across ten struggling plants and end up with nothing to show for any of them.

A Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

One year I wanted to go all out and grow everything. My yields were the worst I’d ever had — I was trying to do too much, with too many things I had no real experience growing.

These days I focus on what I’m already good at:

  • Pumpkins and other winter squash
  • Carrots
  • Beets
  • Lettuce
  • Swiss chard
  • Onions
  • Plus my established perennials

I try one or two new things each year, and leave it at that. 

Where to Start

Even if your vegetables don’t end up saving you money outright, they’ll still be higher quality — often tastier and healthier — than almost anything you can buy.

7 – Grow Herbs

A lot of people will tell you growing herbs is an advanced skill, but if you choose the right ones, they’re actually pretty easy. 

Pick one or two culinary herbs that grow well in your area or grow well in pots so you can bring them inside over the winter. 

 Mediterranean herbs like sage, oregano, thyme, and rosemary grow well in pots or raised beds (wherever there’s good drainage) and don’t need to be watered often. 

These also double as safe medicinal herbs for your home apothecary, which is the growing side of what we covered back in the herbalism section above.

Adding an herb or two to your garden adds diversity, repels pests, and gives you a real cash crop since herbs are expensive in the store. 

A small clamshell of fresh sage or thyme can run $5 if not more and barely lasts one recipe. One established plant produces that same amount, over and over, for an entire growing season, for the cost of a single seed packet or starter plant.

Sage was actually the herb that humbled me most. I killed it more than once trying to get it established in my Zone 4 garden before I finally figured out what it actually needed to overwinter here — I wrote the whole story here if you want to skip a few years of trial and error:

How I Turned Sage from an Annual into a Perennial in My Zone 4/5 Garden

And if you’re in the Northeast US, check out this post: 

9 New Hampshire Native Herbal Plants That Control Garden Pests

…a good one if you want your herbs doing double duty as pest control.

8 – Grow Eggs

Once you already have the skills above in place, you’re likely saving money — or making a little extra — which makes eggs the natural next step. 

Eggs are one of the best sources of protein you can produce at home. They’re cheap compared to meat, easy to grow (no butchering needed), and you get to have fun with your feathered backyard buds along the way.

Chickens are the obvious choice for a backyard flock, but ducks are just as good — arguably better, if you like their eggs. 

Here’s how duck eggs actually differ from chicken eggs if you’re deciding between the two.

But getting started with chickens (or ducks) does require some upfront cost. You’ll need:

  • Housing (a coop)
  • Outdoor space to scratch around in — at least 10 square feet per bird
  • Fencing, ideally, to protect them from predators

If you’re starting with baby chicks, you’ll also need to feed them for about 5–6 months before you see your first egg — so budget for that wait time as well.

A few ways to bring the startup cost down:

  • Build your own coop instead of buying one
  • Buy a coop secondhand
  • Repurpose an existing outbuilding instead of building from scratch

There are also a lot of ways to reduce the ongoing cost of feed — but when you’re new, I recommend sticking with a pre-formulated organic pellet, even if it’s not the cheapest option on paper.

I say that from experience. Early on, I followed some feeding advice I misunderstood, and it meant my chickens weren’t getting properly nourished for a while. I still feel bad about it, years later. 

My advice now: keep it simple, and just buy the pre-formulated pellet until you really know what you’re doing.

If you decide to get chickens, here are some resources:

Chickens are a gateway animal, so don’t be surprised when you get a few… then a few more… then a few of every other kind of livestock you can get your hands on!

9 – Animal Husbandry

Speaking of getting more and more livestock… while raising your own eggs, you’ll naturally pick up animal husbandry — the practice of caring for farm animals. 

You’ll learn to observe your animals for signs of illness or injury, and how to care for those illnesses and injuries when they come up. 

You’ll learn the specifics of caring for chickens, ducks, rabbits, or whichever animals you have, and those skills make learning about any new animal down the line much easier. 

You’ll also learn how to keep their spaces clean to prevent illness in the first place, and build a routine around doing that.

Aside from the cost of raising whichever animal you’re keeping, there’s no additional cost to learning animal husbandry itself. And that’s what makes it valuable! 

You’re building a genuinely marketable skill while you’re already paying to raise your own livestock anyway. (More on turning skills like this into actual income in a bit.)

This is one of those skills I didn’t even realize I had until I sat down to write this post. 

But I know a lot about caring for sick or injured chickens and ducks — more importantly, I know how to prevent those issues before they start. 

One thing I do is give my flock herbs preventively.

Learn more about my favorite herbs to give to my flock in this post

But there are a lot of things to learn about caring for your flock, some of which you can only learn as you do it (sorry, no avoiding failure here!)

And once you’re caring for animals day in and day out, you start noticing something else: how much all of this shifts with the seasons. 

10 – Living and Working Seasonally

Growing food on a homestead is always going to have a big seasonality to it.  Vegetables grow in the summer. Animals are out and about more when there’s more light. Chickens go in at dusk. 

And as that shifts throughout the year, you’ll find yourself deeply connected to exactly what time the sun is rising and setting — whether you meant to be or not!

While this one is more of a mindset or lifestyle adjustment, you likely won’t fully embrace it until you do have some land to work with, which is why I left it for the end of the list.

Homestead Life Flips the Typical Work Year

Society mostly works hard through the cold winter months and takes its rest in summer with vacations and trips. Homestead life tends to flip that.

You work hard during the days when light is abundant, and rest more during the days when the nights are long, and it’s cold outside.

I actually find myself looking forward to the cooler months — the slower pace, more time for reading and watching shows, the evenings where I can close the chickens in at 4:30 pm and have the whole rest of the night to myself, or to go out with friends.

 I do those things in summer too, but there’s always the extra step of figuring out if and how we can get the chickens and ducks inside before we leave.

If You’re Still Working a Conventional Job

If you’re still working a conventional job to make ends meet, winter is actually where that fits best. 

Long, dark evenings are exactly the stretch to lean into a day job, side income, or extra hours — the homestead asks less of you during that season anyway. 

Then when the days lengthen again, you shift more of that energy back outside.

I tend to do more of my writing and planning in the colder months so I can spend more time outside when it’s time for gardening. 

It’s Okay to Want It the Other Way

At first blush, you might think: yeah, but I’d rather enjoy my summer and work in the winter instead. That’s completely fine — you can absolutely still do that with your day job.

But here’s how I see it: I spend summer doing what I love — gardening, caring for animals — and then I get a break in winter to work on reading, writing, and other indoor projects, with more built-in time to rest when the light itself is asking me to slow down.

If you want to know a little more about living seasonally, check out these blog posts:

11 – Waste Cycling and Soil Care

Even with just a small garden, it’s important to care for the soil well. Healthy soil means a healthier garden… and a much easier one to care for!

So it’s worth setting up a system for adding nutrition back into your soil early on, so you don’t have to rely on store-bought fertilizers.

This is one of the most overlooked money-savers on this whole list. Bagged soil amendments and fertilizers add up fast, and most of what they’re providing, you can build yourself for free from stuff you’re already throwing away.

When you’re just starting out, keep it simple:

Waste Cycling also includes the appropriate use of animal waste. Livestock manure can be a truly great way to boost soil health, but once you’re the one shoveling and hauling it around the homestead, it can become tough work that drains your time fast.

That’s exactly why, in permaculture design, we try to match the output of one element on the homestead (like chicken manure) with a place where that output can actually be put to use (like a garden). 

I run a permaculture poultry system that cycles my flock through gardens and berry patches for this exact reason — the chickens do a lot of the fertilizing and pest control work for me, instead of me hauling manure by hand.

That’s a more advanced technique you can learn later on. For now, a simple compost system or worm bin is more than enough to get your soil and garden off to a strong, low-cost start. 

And a quick tip for making composting easier: put your compost pile directly in a garden bed, so when it’s ready all you have to do is spread it out and then start a new pile in a new spot taht coudlsue some soil improvement.

If soil ends up being the thing you get really into (it happens to more of us than you’d expect), I go a lot deeper on building real, lasting soil fertility in my Soil Building Workshop, where I go into ways to build soil while you’re growing food like chop and drop mulching, interplanting, and other gardening methods that build soil naturally. 

 But everything above is really enough to get a strong start without spending a dime on it.

Making (and Saving) Money While You Learn

Being broke while wanting to make a huge lifestyle change can be frustrating, but it is possible. All you need is a small change every day.

Two things helped me the most: cutting spending in places I could, and finding small ways homesteading skills could bring money back in — especially once you’re further along and have things like eggs, extra seedlings, or preserved food to work with. 

My blog post on 57 ways to make extra money homesteading covers this side of things in depth — soap, eggs, seedlings, preserved food, all the ways those skills above can start paying you back instead of only costing you time.

It won’t happen overnight, and not every skill turns into income. 

We’re all different and some people enjoy setting up and working a farmers market while others feel like it’s a drag. 

But almost every skill on this list has the potential to either make you money or give you something you could barter with, which is part of why I’d rather you learn to make something yourself than just cut it from the budget entirely.

And you will eventually find the thing that’s totally you. Something that suits your skills and interests perfectly.

Where to Go Once the Basics Feel Easy

Eventually, scratch cooking, homemade deodorant, and even a small flock of chickens stop feeling like a stretch. That’s usually when people start asking me what’s next — and that’s when things get more interesting, because this is where I spend most of my time now.

When you’re ready to go deeper than beginner basics:

You don’t need to touch any of these right away. But designing permaculture spaces is one of my favorite things to talk about and help people with, and it truly changes the way your homestead runs and how much work you’re doing. 

So if highly efficient, sustainable spaces are appealing to you, come back to these when you have land — rented, borrowed, or only a tenth of an acre. It’s all good! 

Where I’d Start If I Were You

If you only take one thing from this post: don’t wait until you have money, land, or a plan to start homesteading. Start with the thing in front of you that’s annoying you enough to fix yourself.

For me it was hair products and salad dressing. For you it’ll be something else entirely. The point is to get started before you’re ready so you’ll be ready when the perfect place shows up!

What’s the first thing you’re going to make instead of buy?

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4 Comments

  2. I started apartment homesteading last year, I started growing veggies in 5 gallon buckets and baking my own bread from scratch. I am trying to learn how to dry can food currently, and am trying to decide if I want to learn how to knit. I would love chickens, but idk how I would manage that in an apt, lol.

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